Man, the Unknown

By Alexis Carrell and David De Angelis

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine, Dr. Alexis Carrel, one of the greatest scientists who ever lived, tells us what man is in terms of mental and physical composition and how he can become the true master of his universe if he learns to use his incredible God-given powers wisely.

"The wisest, deepest, and most valuable book I have come across in American literature of our century."
- Will Durant, author of History of Philosophy

"Meaningful, candid, courageous, and genuinely sincere."
-New York Times

"Provocative and thought-provoking."
-Saturday Review

"A work of genius...the breadth, the variety of perspectives, the courageous disregard for currently accepted beliefs that characterize great books."
-New York Herald Tribune

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stargatebook
• Release date: Aug 29, 2022
• ISBN: 9791221394344

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INTRODUCTION

THIS BOOK is having the paradoxical destiny of becoming more timely while it grows older. Since its publication, its significance has increased continually. For the value of ideas, as of all things, is relative. It augments or decreases according to our state of mind. Under the pressure of the events that agitate Europe, Asia, and America, our mental attitude has progressively changed. We are beginning to understand the meaning of the crisis. We know that it does not consist simply in the cyclic recurrence of economic disorders. That neither prosperity nor war will solve the problems of modern society. Like sheep at the approach of a storm, civilized humanity vaguely feels the presence of danger. And we are driven by anxiety toward the ideas that deal with the mystery of our ills.

This book originated from the observation of a simple fact--the high development of the sciences of inanimate matter, and our ignorance of life. Mechanics, chemistry, and physics have progressed much more rapidly than physiology, psychology, and sociology. Man has gained the mastery of the material world before knowing himself. Thus, modern society has been built at random, according to the chance of scientific discoveries and to the fancy of ideologies, without regard for the laws of our body and soul. We have been the victims of a disastrous illusion--the illusion of our ability to emancipate ourselves from natural laws. We have forgotten that nature never forgives.

In order to endure, society, as well as individuals, should conform to the laws of life. We cannot erect a house without a knowledge of the law of gravity. In order to be commanded, nature must be obeyed, said Bacon. The essential needs of the human being, the characteristics of his mind and organs, his relations with his environment, are easily subjected to scientific observation. The jurisdiction of science extends to all observable phenomena--the spiritual as well as the intellectual and the physiological. Man in his entirety can be apprehended by the scientific method. But the science of man differs from all other sciences. It must be synthetic as well as analytic, since man is simultaneously unity and multiplicity. This science alone is capable of giving birth to a technique for the construction of society. In the future organization of the individual and collective life of humanity, philosophical and social doctrines must give precedence to the positive knowledge of ourselves. Science, for the first time in the history of the world, brings to a tottering civilization the power to renovate itself and to continue its ascension.

* *

The necessity for this renovation is becoming more evident each year. Newspapers, magazines, cinema, and radio ceaselessly spread news illustrating the growing contrast between material progress and social disorder. The triumphs of science in some fields mask its impotence in others. For the marvels of technology, such as featured, for example, in the New York World's Fair, create comfort, simplify our existence, increase the rapidity of communications, put at our disposal quantities of new materials, synthesize chemical products that cure dangerous diseases as if by magic. But they fail to bring us economic security, happiness, moral sense, and peace. These royal gifts of science have burst like a thunderstorm upon us while we are still too ignorant to use them wisely. And they may become highly destructive. Will they not make war an unprecedented catastrophe? For they will be responsible for the death of millions of men who are the flower of civilization, for the destruction of priceless treasures accumulated by centuries of culture on the soil of Europe, and for the ultimate weakening of the white race. Modern life has brought another danger, more subtle but still more formidable than war: the extinction of the best elements of the race. The birth rate is falling in all nations, except in Germany and Russia. France is becoming depopulated already. England and Scandinavia will soon be in the same condition. In the United States, the upper third of the population reproduces much less rapidly than the lower third. Europe and the United States are thus undergoing a qualitative as well as quantitative deterioration. On the contrary, the Asiatics and Africans, such as the Russians, the Arabs, the Hindus, are increasing with marked rapidity. Never have the European races been in such great peril as today. Even if a suicidal war is avoided, we will be faced with degeneration because of the sterility of the strongest and most intelligent stock.

No conquests deserve so much admiration as those made by physiology and medicine. The civilized nations are now protected from the great epidemics, such as plague, cholera, typhus, and other infectious diseases. Owing to hygiene and to a growing knowledge of nutrition, the inhabitants of the over-populated cities are clean, wellnourished, in better health, and the average duration of life has increased considerably. Nevertheless, hygiene and medicine, even with the aid of the schools, have not succeeded in improving the intellectual and moral quality of the population. Modern men and women manifest nervous weakness, mental instability, lack of moral sense. About 15 per cent remain at the psychologic age of twelve years. There are hosts of feeble-minded and insane. The number of misfits reaches perhaps thirty or forty million. Furthermore, criminality increases. The recent statistics of J. Edgar Hoover show that this country actually contains nearly five million criminals. The tone of our civilization cannot help being influenced by the prevalence of mental weakness, dishonesty, and criminality. It is significant that panic spread through the population when a radio cast enacted an invasion of the earth by the inhabitants of Mars. Also, that a former president of the Stock Exchange of New York was convicted of theft, and an eminent Federal judge of selling his verdicts. At the same time, normal individuals are being crushed under the weight of those who are incapable of adapting themselves to life. The majority of the people lives on the work of the minority. Despite the enormous sums spent by the government, the economic crisis continues. In the richest country of the world, millions are in want. It is evident that human intelligence has not increased simultaneously with the complexity of the problems to be solved. Today, as much as in the past, civilized humanity shows itself incapable of directing either its individual or its collective existence.

* *

As a matter of fact, modern society--that society produced by science and technology-is committing the same mistake as have all the civilizations of antiquity. It has created conditions of life wherein life itself becomes impossible. It justifies the sally of Dean Inge: Civilization is a disease which is almost invariably fatal. The real significance of the events that are taking place in Europe and in this country is not yet understood by the public. Nevertheless, it is becoming obvious to those few who have the inclination and the time to think. Our civilization is in danger. And this danger menaces simultaneously the race, the nations, and the individuals. Each one of us will be struck by the ruin brought about by a European war. Each one suffers already from the confusion in our life and in our social institutions, from the general weakening of moral sense, from economic insecurity, from the burden imposed upon the community by defectives and criminals. The crisis is due neither to the presence of Mr. Roosevelt in the White House, nor to that of Hitler in Germany nor of Mussolini in Rome. It comes from the very structure of civilization. It is a crisis of man. Man is not able to manage the world derived from the caprice of his intelligence. He has no other alternative than to remake this world according to the laws of life. He must adapt his environment to the nature of his organic and mental activities, and renovate his habits of existence. Otherwise, modern society will join ancient Greece and the Roman Empire in the realm of nothingness. And the basis of this renovation can be found only in the knowledge of our body and soul.

No lasting civilization will ever be founded upon philosophical and social ideologies. The democratic ideology itself, unless reconstructed upon a scientific basis, has no more chance of surviving than the fascist or marxist ideologies. For none of these systems embraces man in his entire reality. In truth, all political and economic doctrines have so far ignored the science of man. However, the power of the scientific method is obvious. Science has conquered the material world. And science will give man, if his will is indomitable, mastery over life and over himself.

The domain of science comprises the totality of the observable and of the measurable. That is, all the things that are located in the spatio-temporal continuum--man, as well as the ocean, the clouds, the atoms, the stars. As man is endowed with mental activities, science reaches through him the world of the mind, that world which stretches beyond space and time. Observation and experience are the only means of apprehending reality in a positive manner. For observation and experience give birth to concepts which, although incomplete, remain eternally true. These concepts are operational concepts, as defined by Bridgman. They proceed directly from the measurement or the accurate observation of things. They are applicable to the study of man as well as to that of inanimate objects. For such a study, they must be constructed in as great a number as possible, with the aid of all the techniques that we are capable of developing. In the light of these concepts, man appears as unity and multiplicity--a center of activities simultaneously material and spiritual, and strictly dependent on the physicochemical and psychological environment in which he is immersed. Considered thus in a concrete manner, he differs profoundly from the abstract being dreamed by political and social ideologies. It is upon this concrete man, and not upon abstractions, that society should be erected. There is no other road open to human progress than the optimum development of all the physiological, intellectual, and spiritual potentialities of the individual. Only apprehension of the whole reality can save modern man. We must, therefore, give up philosophical systems, and rely exclusively upon scientific concepts.

* *

The natural fate of all civilizations is to rise and to decline--and to vanish into dust. Our civilization may perhaps escape the common fate, because it has at its disposal the unlimited resources of science. But science deals exclusively with the forces of intelligence. And intelligence never urges men to action. Only fear, enthusiasm, self-sacrifice, hatred, and love can infuse with life the products of our mind. The youth of Germany and Italy, for example, are driven by faith to sacrifice themselves for an ideal-even if that ideal is false. Perhaps the democracies will also engender men burning with the passion to create. Perhaps, in Europe and in America, there are such men, still young, poor, and unknown. But enthusiasm and faith, if not united to the knowledge of the whole reality, will remain sterile. The Russian revolutionists had the will and the strength to build up a new civilization. They failed because they relied upon the incomplete vision of Karl Marx, instead of a truly scientific concept of man. The renovation of modern society demands, besides a profound spiritual urge, the knowledge of man in his wholeness.

But the wholeness of man has many different aspects. These aspects are the object of special sciences, such as physiology, psychology, sociology, eugenics, pedagogy, medicine, and many others. There are specialists for each of them. But none for man as a whole. Special sciences are incapable of solving even the most simple human problems. An architect, a schoolmaster, a physician, for example, are acquainted in an incomplete manner with the problems of habitation, education, and health. For each of these problems concerns all human activities, and transcends the frontiers of any special science. There is, at this moment, imperative need for men possessing, like Aristotle, universal knowledge. But Aristotle himself could not embrace all modern sciences. We must, therefore, have recourse to composite Aristotles. That is, to small groups of men belonging to different specialties, and capable of welding their individual thoughts into a synthetic whole. Such minds can certainly be found--minds endowed with that universalism which spreads its tentacles over all things. The technique of collective thinking requires much intelligence and disinterestedness. Few individuals are apt at this type of research. But collective thinking alone will permit human problems to be solved. Today, mankind should be given an immortal brain, a permanent focus of thoughts to guide its faltering steps. Our institutions for scientific research are not sufficient, because their discoveries are always fragmentary. In order to build a science of man, and a technology of civilization, centers of synthesis must be created where collective thinking and integration of specialized data will forge a new knowledge. In this manner, both individuals and society will be given the immovable foundations of operational concepts, and the power to survive.

* *

To sum up, the events of the last few years have rendered more evident the danger menacing the entire civilization of the Occident. However, the public does not yet fully understand the significance of the economic crisis, of the decline in the birth rate, of the moral, nervous, and mental decay of the individual. It does not conceive how immense a

catastrophe a European war will be for humanity--how urgent is our renovation. Nevertheless, in democratic countries, the initiative for this renovation must emanate from the people, and not from the leaders. This is the reason for presenting this book again to the public. Although, during the four years of its career, it has spread beyond the frontiers of the English-speaking countries through all civilized nations, the ideas that it contains have reached only a few million persons. To contribute, even in a humble manner, to the construction of the new City, these ideas must invade the population as the sea infiltrates the sands of the shore. Our renovation can come only from the effort of all. To progress again, man must remake himself. And he cannot remake himself without suffering. For he is both the marble and the sculptor. In order to uncover his true visage, he must shatter his own substance with heavy blows of his hammer.

New York, June 15, 1939

Contents

INTRODUCTION

Chapter I THE NEED OF A BETTER KNOWLEDGE OF MAN

Chapter II THE SCIENCE OF MAN

Chapter III BODY AND PHYSIOLOGICAL ACTIVITIES

Chapter IV MENTAL ACTIVITIES

Chapter V INWARD TIME

Chapter VI ADAPTIVE FUNCTIONS

Chapter VII THE INDIVIDUAL

Chapter VIII THE REMAKING OF MAN

Chapter I

THE NEED OF A BETTER KNOWLEDGE OF MAN

1

THERE is a strange disparity between the sciences of inert matter and those of life. Astronomy, mechanics, and physics are based on concepts which can be expressed, tersely and elegantly, in mathematical language. They have built up a universe as harmonious as the monuments of ancient Greece. They weave about it a magnificent texture of calculations and hypotheses. They search for reality beyond the realm of common thought up to unutterable abstractions consisting only of equations of symbols. Such is not the position of biological sciences. Those who investigate the phenomena of life are as if lost in an inextricable jungle, in the midst of a magic forest, whose countless trees unceasingly change their place and their shape. They are crushed under a mass of facts, which they can describe but are incapable of defining in algebraic equations. From the things encountered in the material world, whether atoms or stars, rocks or clouds, steel or water, certain qualities, such as weight and spatial dimensions, have been abstracted. These abstractions, and not the concrete facts, are the matter of scientific reasoning. The observation of objects constitutes only a lower form of science, the descriptive form. Descriptive science classifies phenomena. But the unchanging relations between variable quantities--that is, the natural laws, only appear when science becomes more abstract. It is because physics and chemistry are abstract and quantitative that they had such great and rapid success. Although they do not pretend to unveil the ultimate nature of things, they give us the power to predict future events, and often to determine at will their occurrence. In learning the secret of the constitution and of the properties of matter, we have gained the mastery of almost everything which exists on the surface of the earth, excepting ourselves.

The science of the living beings in general, and especially of the human individual, has not made such great progress. It still remains in the descriptive state. Man is an indivisible whole of extreme complexity. No simple representation of him can be obtained. There is no method capable of apprehending him simultaneously in his entirety, his parts, and his relations with the outer world. In order to analyze ourselves, we are obliged to seek the help of various techniques and, therefore, to utilize several sciences. Naturally, all these sciences arrive at a different conception of their common object. They abstract only from man what is attainable by their special methods. And those abstractions, after they have been added together, are still less rich than the concrete fact. They leave behind them a residue, too important to be neglected. Anatomy, chemistry, physiology, psychology, pedagogy, history, sociology, political economy do not exhaust their subject. Man, as known to the specialists, is far from being the concrete man, the real man. He is nothing but a schema, consisting of other schemata built up by the techniques of each science. He is, at the same time, the corpse dissected by the anatomists, the consciousness observed by the psychologists and the great teachers of the spiritual life, and the personality which introspection shows to everyone as lying in the depth of himself. He is the chemical substances constituting the tissues and humors of the body. He is the amazing community of cells and nutrient fluids whose organic laws are studied by the physiologists. He is the compound of tissues and consciousness that hygienists and educators endeavor to lead to its optimum development while it extends into time. He is the homo oeconomicus who must ceaselessly consume manufactured products in order that the machines, of which he is made a slave, may be kept at work. But he is also the poet, the hero, and the saint. He is not only the prodigiously complex being analyzed by our scientific techniques, but also the tendencies, the conjectures, the aspirations of humanity. Our conceptions of him are imbued with metaphysics. They are founded on so many and such imprecise data that the temptation is great to choose among them those which please us. Therefore, our idea of man varies according to our feelings and our beliefs. A materialist and a spiritualist accept the same definition of a crystal of sodium chloride. But they do not agree with one another upon that of the human being. A mechanistic physiologist and a vitalistic physiologist do not consider the organism in the same light. The living being of Jacques Loeb differs profoundly from that of Hans Driesch. Indeed, mankind has made a gigantic effort to know itself. Although we possess the treasure of the observations accumulated by the scientists, the philosophers, the poets, and the great mystics of all times, we have grasped only certain aspects of ourselves. We do not apprehend man as a whole. We know him as composed of distinct parts. And even these parts are created by our methods. Each one of us is made up of a procession of phantoms, in the midst of which strides an unknowable reality.

In fact, our ignorance is profound. Most of the questions put to themselves by those who study human beings remain without answer. Immense regions of our inner world are still unknown. How do the molecules of chemical substances associate in order to form the complex and temporary organs of the cell? How do the genes contained in the nucleus of a fertilized ovum determine the characteristics of the individual deriving from that ovum? How do cells organize themselves by their own efforts into societies, such as the tissues and the organs? Like the ants and the bees, they have advance knowledge of the part they are destined to play in the life of the community. And hidden mechanisms enable them to build up an organism both complex and simple. What is the nature of our duration of psychological time, and of physiological time? We know that we are a compound of tissues, organs, fluids, and consciousness. But the relations between consciousness and cerebrum are still a mystery. We lack almost entirely a knowledge of the physiology of nervous cells. To what extent does will power modify the organism? How is the mind influenced by the state of the organs? In what manner can the organic and mental characteristics, which each individual inherits, be changed by the mode of life, the chemical substances contained in food, the climate, and the physiological and moral disciplines?

We are very far from knowing what relations exist between skeleton, muscles, and organs, and mental and spiritual activities. We are ignorant of the factors that bring about nervous equilibrium and resistance to fatigue and to diseases. We do not know how moral sense, judgment, and audacity could be augmented. What is the relative importance of intellectual, moral, and mystical activities? What is the significance of esthetic and religious sense? What form of energy is responsible for telepathic communications? Without any doubt, certain physiological and mental factors determine happiness or misery, success or failure. But we do not know what they are. We cannot artificially give to any individual the aptitude for happiness. As yet, we do not know what environment is the most favorable for the optimum development of civilized man. Is it possible to suppress struggle, effort, and suffering from our physiological and spiritual formation? How can we prevent the degeneracy of man in modern civilization? Many other questions could be asked on subjects which are to us of the utmost interest. They would also remain unanswered. It is quite evident that the accomplishments of all the sciences having man as an object remain insufficient, and that our knowledge of ourselves is still most rudimentary.

2

Our ignorance may be attributed, at the same time, to the mode of existence of our ancestors, to the complexity of our nature, and to the structure of our mind. Before all, man had to live. And that need demanded the conquest of the outer world. It was imperative to secure food and shelter, to fight wild animals and other men. For immense periods, our forefathers had neither the leisure nor the inclination to study themselves. They employed their intelligence in other ways, such as manufacturing weapons and tools, discovering fire, training cattle and horses, inventing the wheel, the culture of cereals, etc., etc. Long before becoming interested in the constitution of their body and their mind, they meditated on the sun, the moon, the stars, the tides, and the passing of the seasons. Astronomy was already far advanced at an epoch when physiology was totally unknown. Galileo reduced the earth, center of the world, to the rank of a humble satellite of the sun, while his contemporaries had not even the most elementary notion of the structure and the functions of brain, liver, or thyroid gland. As, under the natural conditions of life, the human organism works satisfactorily and needs no attention, science progressed in the direction in which it was led by human curiosity--that is, toward the outer world.

From time to time, among the billions of human beings who have successively inhabited the earth, a few were bora endowed with rare and marvelous powers, the intuition of unknown things, the imagination that creates new worlds, and the faculty of discovering the hidden relations existing between certain phenomena. These men explored the physical universe. This universe is of a simple constitution. Therefore, it rapidly gave in to the attack of the scientists and yielded the secret of certain of its laws. And the knowledge of these laws enabled us to utilize the world of matter for our own profit. The practical applications of scientific discoveries are lucrative for those who promote them. They facilitate the existence of all. They please the public, whose comfort they augment. Everyone became, of course, much more interested in the inventions that lessen human effort, lighten the burden of the toiler, accelerate the rapidity of communications, and soften the harshness of life, than in the discoveries that throw some light on the intricate problems relating to the constitution of our body and of our consciousness. The conquest of the material world, which has ceaselessly absorbed the attention and the will of men, caused the organic and the spiritual world to fall into almost complete oblivion. In fact, the knowledge of our surroundings was indispensable, but that of our own nature appeared to be much less immediately useful. However, disease, pain, death, and more or less obscure aspirations toward a hidden power transcending the visible universe, drew the attention of men, in some measure, to the inner world of their body and their mind. At first, medicine contented itself with the practical problem of relieving the sick by empiric recipes. It realized only in recent times that the most effective method of preventing or curing illness is to acquire a complete understanding of the normal and diseased body--that is, to construct the sciences that are called anatomy, biological chemistry, physiology, and pathology. However, the mystery of our existence, the moral sufferings, the craving for the unknown, and the metapsychical phenomena appeared to our ancestors as more important then bodily pain and diseases. The study of spiritual life and of philosophy attracted greater men than the study of medicine. The laws of mysticity became known before those of physiology. But such laws were brought to light only when mankind had acquired sufficient leisure to turn a little of his attention to other things than the conquest of the outer world.

There is another reason for the slow progress of the knowledge of ourselves. Our mind is so constructed as to delight in contemplating simple facts. We feel a kind of repugnance in attacking such a complex problem as that of the constitution of living beings and of man. The intellect, as Bergson wrote, is characterized by a natural inability to comprehend life. On the contrary, we love to discover in the cosmos the geometrical forms that exist in the depths of our consciousness. The exactitude of the proportions of our monuments and the precision of our machines express a fundamental character of our mind. Geometry does not exist in the earthly world. It has originated in ourselves. The methods of nature are never so precise as those of man. We do not find in the universe the clearness and accuracy of our thought. We attempt, therefore, to abstract from the complexity of phenomena some simple systems whose components bear to one another certain relations susceptible of being described mathematically. This power of abstraction of the human intellect is responsible for the amazing progress of physics and chemistry. A similar success has rewarded the physicochemical study of living beings. The laws of chemistry and of physics are identical in the world of living things and in that of inanimate matter, as Claude Bernard